04:Tabish Shaikh -Virtual Company – 70 employees

Tabish Sheikh is a Young Entrepreneur , He do Team Manage, Client Handling , Running a Company, Luminative Solutions which deals in Website and Mobiles apps Development.

Transcription

Q1: Give your brief Introduction.

Ans: First of all, thank-you for choosing me as a guest.

Our Company is a Multinational company working in almost 5 countries. Hiring and recruiting is done in Pakistan. Almost all our clients are international while only some are local, which are related to content writing department. Our departments include graphic designing, website development and designing,Mobile apps designing and development and content writing and academic writing. Our company members work remotely and there is no noise inside our office. We covered almost the whole Pakistan and has employees in Lahore, Hyderabad, Rawalpindi and may be in Sialkot and some other places, as in most cases I forget the places of people(smiling..)

Q2: What’s your age?

Ans: My age is 20.

Q3: The basic thing is the Motivation for newbies that how Tabish is successfully running a company of 70+ employees in this age. And Now Tabish, from how many years you are running this company?

Ans: It’ more than 5 years. Before that I was used to do freelancing.

Q4: In Team Management, what steps you follow in order to hire a person?

Ans: Before Hiring a person, It is important that the recruiter which is going to hire the new person should also have some knowledge about the same field. As I am a developer so I can ask someone the specific things about development and from the feedback we can judge the person. if the person has weak knowledge the feedback will not be much effective but if the person has full command in field , the feedback will be much stronger and effective.

previous Experience of the person is also considered and if he is working previously in another company ,the performance of the person in that company should also be considered. Taking all these factors in mind we then choose a suitable person

Q5: During Hiring, How you made a contract with the person ?like the time period etc.

Ans: There is a 3 month promotion period and in that period a skilled person can easily be judged. Just as website development is a huge field e.g PHP, HTML etc , so every developer is dealt according to his skill set.

Q6: Have you an office timing for your work or you have the system of task assignment without time restrictions?

Ans: Exactly we have also 8 working hours, break time is separate. If any employee do a break in working hours he should have to cover those in coming days.

Q7: How you monitor your employees ? By using any tool or any other method ?

Ans: For Monitoring we use a tool which I developed myself. and In that tool we have to set the time like working hours and it keep track of activities like log in time, log out time, browser usage duration,etc. So because during work Softwares like Netbeans and browser usage is much more than any other activity so it is easily estimated whether how much time the person worked or whether he worked or not.

Q8: How you got Motivation toward this field in such a small age of 15 years.?

Ans: Yeah, I am very interested in this till my childhood at the age of 10 or 11 years. I used to play football very much at that time and even while playing i was thinking about websites and while playing online games(at that time) I used to think about how the things actually work like how games are made, and from there I come to know about HTML, Css and php and all such things. In those days a friend of mine , who came form UK met with me and used to tell me about what PHP is and things like that. After that we did many joint ventures and from here I got startup.

Q9: How you learned these skills related to development ?whether by joining an institute?

Ans: I only used Google. Learned from sites like w3schools and Google is like the heaven of everything. I also read many ebooks, although most of the people dont like reading ebooks,or they don’t go through all of it.

Q10: Please continue as you got the idea of Startup ?then ?

Ans: I used to learn development with my two other companions. Our third companion, was also doing job in a company and he says that he can not gave us time, so we together started learning from the start and then we started remote office in Pakistan i-e Online. Mostly during hiring at that time we have been asked many questions like “How can we trust you? ” and “I want to meet you..” and I usually has to answer that before hiring there will be no meeting but after hiring we will arrange Team meetings and you should have to attend and there you can meet every employee but before hiring i don’t meet anyone as i have a very tight schedule and I make schedule of 2-3 days already and that’s how I organize my work.

Q11: How you started initially and with how much capital? if any ?

Ans: I already was background and old client-base in development before starting and this acts as capital and we improved that and gradually we got famous , and we now have many clients some are permanent clients and if there is any problem we always ready to help them. They are all important to us and we know in any case they will look toward us.

Q12: As you say that you have mostly international clients. Which steps you follow in order to successfully deal internationally?

Ans: Basically, they look for quality.If you are good at your work and can impress them with your work and words , then they are for you. Like When we(me and my friend at Lahore) started making clients at start, his(my friend’s) English was very good than me as he was the citizen of UK so he used to talk in british English fluently and because of him I also learned and got a strong English background. and this is the thing that if your English and your work is Good , you can get better clients.

Q13: How you finalize your work charges? Either you have a fixed rate or you used to consult with client to get agree on a price ?

Ans: For Price, we judge the client by his way of talking that how much price he can afford and if we see that the person is less confident in talking and somehow shy, then we ask him directly to tell his budget and we used to tell them that you will came across higher prices in Market but our quality is much better than them and we remain our quality. I always use to hire new developer after a month or a half . I choose the straight forward developers that are able to write ‘to the point’ code . The developers here are not so much trained to follow these rules although many long term developers are working with us from 2-5 years but mostly new developers leave after 6 months or I kick them off because of low quality or because of their carelessness in work.

Q14: How you judge that a specific worker is not meeting your quality standards and he has to be get out from company ?

Ans: I am continuously getting statistics that how much hours a worker worked etc and e.g If the client is from Karachi and I have the information about duration of loadshedding in various areas of Karachi and so if the client make lame excuses , we used to ask him why he is not paying attention to the work?,whether the salary is less or if he has any other problem?. and then if this the very rare chance, then its ok. Otherwise, if he always used to take more time than specified , it means he is careless and not paying attention to work. In such case we have to take some serious action.

Q15: What factors should kept in mind while dealing with a client ?Because there are also many online scams. May be in any condition payment will not be delivered by client .Then in such cases how you manage your employee’s salary and etc.?

Ans: The danger of scams is always there. Even after 50% upfront and 75% upfront, we can face scams. I will not suggest for 100% upfront because client because the security and trust of client also matters. Sometimes client didn’t get the deliverable although we have made them. In that cases, we manage the cost on deliverables through other clients and orders.There is an online service for secure deals but they charge high price i-e 8% from buyer and 8% from reciever, but anyway, thats a very good service and if there occurs a dispute they try to solve the reason whether the dispute occurs due to client or seller.

Q16: If you have to start from zero as a newbie, which steps and procedures you adopt in order to start ?

Ans: First step is to learn the skills, So first I will make a research on what I have to learn like if i want to learn designing , I want to learn to use photoshop. Time will be managed even now I spent 3-4 sleepless night due to the burden of work. After getting the skills, I will go to facebook groups and started advertising about my skills and from there I can easily get 1 -2 clients of my field and then gradually I will go broader with time.

Q17: As you have a background in development so What steps you suggest a person will take in order to be expert in the field of developmentlike PHP etc ?

Ans: A guy can be an expert only in one thing or he can be a jack for few things. If anyone want expertise he should be concerned to only that thing in which he wants to be expert. For example if a person want to be an expert in PHP, not only he should dive in PHP but also should look at its frameworks because frameworks helps a lot in baking things and very helpful in making web apps. Some people makes the Pakistani Market dirty like if a person charges Rs 150 for a quality service they will charge Rs. 20 for that. I have also experienced the same thing as I ask I will do the work in Rs 900 and they are like “There are guys who did the same in Rs 300″ and then I used to say “Then go towards them “..

Q18: About Which things a person should take care of in his portfolio while applying for a job?

Ans: First thing is CV. There is a proper method of making an impressive CV. Some people don’t know how to make a proper CV. CV basically shows you, your skills and basic information about you. So if your CV will not be attractive then the interviewer will not call you, thinking that if this person is unable to make a CV, how will he do other tasks?. Even if you don’t know how to make a good CV you can google for it. After your CV is ready, and you want to resign from previous company, the factors will be judged that why you wanted to leave? Either the work is not interesting or the salary is less. Basic reasons are these two. Other reasons can also exist based on the person.

Q19: At last, Any suggestion/feedback if you want to share for our audience and especially newbies.

Ans: Analyze yourself and choose your field of work. Let your Passion , interest inside to came out and after that if you work in your field of interest with passion, you can what you want to be even if you want to be a developer, you can be.
Another thing I want to share is if you are running a virtual company of 10-15 employees , you can use Google drive. Make a spreadsheet there, mention the task, deadline, delivery date , delivered(yes or NO) etc. Keep this spreadsheet updated , mention the time required for your employees and make them such as to deliver the task completed in time. If you can trust on employee on if he is an honest person, you can ask him directly, how much time he needs to get the work done and when he will finished he will mark the ‘delivered’ field as ‘Yes’ in the spreadsheet. This is the cheapest if you don’t want to go for a high/expensive stuff.

Q20: if the people want to contact you, then where they can follow and contact you ?

Ans: If anyone want to learn or he is looking for a job regarding web development, web designing, Mobile apps development and designing then he can drop his CV at hr@luminativesolutions.com and we will contact him as soon as we need a developer.

Yousaf Saeed Host at The MasterMind Show
He is an Entrepreneur . He is a Flippa Super Seller. He loves doing Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Product Creation, Product Launching, and Joint Venture. He helped and educated more then 16,000+ people about Internet Marketing and help them start a online Business.